This invention relates to the transmission of electric power consumption data in a “smart metering” system; and more particularly, to a data compression method for reducing the amount of data to be transmitted.
Current trends in the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) market suggest that, for the foreseeable future, increases in the data capacity of a utility communications system used for automated metering will be useful to electric utilities. A significant amount of research has been done to extend the data throughput of AMI systems, but one area that remains relatively unexplored is data compression. Compressing interval data by any significant amount could enable an AMI system to support various combinations of more meters, more frequent intervals, or higher resolution interval data. The method of data compression proposed herein is based upon an analysis of interval data from meters, and various data compression schemes.